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Tuesday, April 29, 2014

(I made reference to this and the re-write I made for The Poetry of Saying, which I also quoted in the last posting here. This is the original text.)

Barry MacSweeney: Odes, Trigram.

The first quality that strikes you is the celerity, the quickness of movement
within these poems.Many of them replace
the conventional margin with a central axis, a form borrowed from McClure (see
example below).The kinetics of this
contrasts the movements of the reading eye on a horizontal plane with a
vertical linearity.Thus we begin one
ode with the line, ‘Crepuscular phantoms energised manhood, soap’ only to be
arrowed down the page to the five single-word lines at its end.

The second quality, allied
to this, is the condensation of the text.The lesson may have been learned from Bunting (who had, years before,
supplied Pound with his maxim ‘dichten = condensare’), though MacSweeney’s Odes owe little to Bunting’s and employ
a more rigorous condensation.This is not the economy that comes of careful
revision but is an economy built into the compositional process.It is perhaps too simple to attribute this
wholly to MacSweeney’s journalistic training, yet we are aware of weird
headline-like qualities in the statements: ‘Oak-pin/shells/survive the/China
Sea’ (p.40).Yet it is difficult to
imagine a story to match the headline.Something more than pared economy gives these poems their strength,
makes this the most powerful collection to have appeared for some time.

Condensation is so acute as
to actually block, and frustrate, our reading at the informational level.Given a naturalistic reading we could say
simply that MacSweeney is retreating into private
meaning, has created a poetry so dense with personal reference, that he
excludes us from the province of meaning altogether.Although this is true, in so far as we
recognise repeated motifs with a special significance for a barely discernable
‘I’ of the text, MacSweeney’s ‘obscurity’ is wilful.He has said, ‘I’ve worked towards this
condensing of language, this cutting across meaning, not having words next to
each other which are supposed to be there, but in a way … I think they are
shocking.’ (p.37, Poetry Information
18).They are attempts to make a
potential reader more acutely responsive to his language.

This is not a poetry where
you can safely ‘get’ the state of mind of the author.The metaphors are only half-elaborated, at
one remove from their usual level of connection.

WING ODE

The
feet are white boats.Hands are

unlocked
keys of colour & shape.Love

me.Feel me beside you

and
within.

(Boats

in
April rain

pools)

I
break my chrysalis

&
Rise!

Walk
as a golden man.

This, one of the shorter, early odes, leaves little
doubt as to its central image of a springtime emergence from a chrysalis, but
the connections between ‘feet’ and ‘white
boats’, and between ‘hands’ and ‘colour
& shape’ are not directly paraphrasable, although we recognise the patterning
of the artifice, the symmetry of the thought.‘Unlocked keys’ suggests many possibilities of interpretation from
paradox to pun.By squeezing metaphoric
language into this indeterminacy MacSweeney has ensured that the poems stay poetic.The hermeneutic exercise (my own notes
included) is useless to grasp the poetic complexity, beyond the definition of
several difficult usages of vocabulary.The exemplary text, the most dense, is the 1971 ode to Jim Morrison of
the Doors, ‘Just 22 and I Don’t Mind Dying’.MacSweeney himself has said of this, ‘The style is compressed,
paratactic.You know what I mean -
commas acting as magnets drawing the next thing in, without having to go into
‘ands’, ‘thes’, all sorts of descriptive shit.What you’re getting in fact was the facets of a diamond, like the facets
of a stone, like complete shape, like Gaudier-Brzeska’s sculpture.’(Poetry
Information 18, p.36)The Vorticist
legacy is an important one, with MacSweeney replacing the linearity of
syntactic structure with a linearity of movement.An essential element of expression has been
squeezed out of what is still a very expressive poetry.‘Just 22 …’ reminds me of certain symbolist
texts.

Blow and she tinkles.Burn the desk, my new

vampire, blousy and blue.Giraffes invade the hands

´
chaque ¾tage.Qui?Smoke your kiss.

Although this poetry requires a special reading, and
is not dissimilar from a great deal of so-called Cambridge poetry with which
MacSweeney has some links, it does not attempt to produce anaemic verse that
remains wittily and indecisively ‘surface’.It admittedly does have wit (‘If finesse is crinkly you’re a / Dairy Box
wrapper, whose heart’s crisp.’), yet its refusal to be pegged down resists any
claim for its autonomy; it gestures towards the referential.It lacks the sophisticated smoothness of tone
associated with much Cambridge poetry.It is also, it is worth adding, as far as possible from the linear
strategies of MacSweeney’s own Black
Torch poem.

Reading is cumulative across
the book.Concepts and symbols rime (in
Duncan’s sense) and at their repetition we cling to them as familiar gobbets of
meaning, though they are frequently slippery fish that, as we handle and
unhook, we lose back into the water.The
‘Wing Ode’ above is contextualised by reference to the euphoric ‘Rise/up and
live!’ of the preceding ‘Flame Ode’.Symbols of masculine sexuality, Snake and Wolf, and of female sexuality,
Torpedo and Vixen, abound throughout, as do references to MacSweeney’s tragic
heroes, Morrison and Thomas Chatterton.There is some verbal play.Thus
the ‘Make your naked phone call moan’ of ‘Flame Ode’ echoes the ‘Make your
naked pencil mine’ of the following ‘Torpedo’.The ‘O pulchritudinous orb de la dish scourer,/bring suds!’ exists in
the tension of mutual parody with the beginning of ‘Dunce Ode’: ‘O
pusillanimous orb de la Brillo / fetch pseuds!’Other sonic devices, such as unexpected rhyme, occasional regular rhythm
and alliteration, give a too-graceful edge to what is, in terms of syntax,
vocabulary and symbolism, an intensely disturbing experience.

The heightened language of
the Odes, pertaining, as the title
implies, to music and its morphologies of feeling,
goes beyond the demands of a poetry of pure surface.Celerity is a guerilla tactic against a
language that belongs increasingly to the controllers of our society.In ‘Far Cliff Babylon’ MacSweeney can adopt a
persona that declares with frightening simplicity in lines that are parodied
throughout the piece:

I
am 16.

I
am a Tory.My

vision
of the future represents

no
people.

These poems cannot be pinned down, anaesthetised
with a fixed meaning, though the feeling - so often of an anger that verges on
the sadistic - is distinct.We are
forced to join in the mechanics of language.We can’t rest in too many of the familiar notions of space/time, social
details, idea, or traditional image, most of the comforting impedimenta of
‘poetry’ as it is understood and transmitted accordingly in the package-deal
mentality of our educationalists.In
‘Far Cliff Babylon’ there comes the stark realisation that ‘I have died every
day since I gave up poetry. / Dangerous condescending humans lapped it
up.’Despite this, the real triumph of
these poems is that they ‘move’ the reader - in both senses of the word.Yet the ‘movement’ of the poems, the celerity
of the text, resists that static aestheticisation of the feeling, that
comforting, introspective notion of having been ‘moved’.If they move us, these poems move us onwards.

Sunday, April 27, 2014

I have been reading the very welcome collection of essays on
Barry MacSweeney, edited by MacSweeney scholar Paul Batchelor, Reading Barry MacSweeney (Tarset:
Bloodaxe, 2013), an important supplement to the work of William Walton Rowe in Three Lyric Poets (Tavistock: Northcote
House, 2009) and the essays in John Wilkinson’s The Lyric Touch (Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2007),(though Marianne Morris’ essay ‘The
Abused Become the Abusers’ in Quid 14
(October 2004) must also be acknowledged, and the long 100 page chapter in
Clive Bush’s volume Out of Dissent
which I read last night).

The oscillation of views on MacSweeney’s work is extreme,
which is not surprising, given its range. The by turns precocious and
derivative early work, uneasily dominated by father-figures like Bunting and/or
Prynne contrasts with the Vorticist impaction of Odes which followed. The either hopeless or aspirational
mythologizing of Ranter gives way to the
violent abjection of middle period political work like ‘Liz Hard’, which is
either enthusiastically embraced as the central work of the oeuvre or dismissed
as its ‘central disaster’ (Peter Riley’s phrase, I think). In one volume, The Book of Demons, readers face either
the pastoral richness or sentimental poverty of the ‘Pearl’
poems, and the execrable or exemplary un-palatability of ‘The Book of Demons’
(depending on one’s views towards the idyllic and the alcoholic). The
collaborative celebration of Apollinaire in his final book Horses in Boiling Blood – a marvellous book I fully recommend to
those who stopped with Wolf Tongue – presented the last in a long line of ventriloquised heroes
and avatars, from Chatterton to Robert Johnson, a strategy which raises various
objections, subtle excuses and lengthy supporting expositions, from his
critics.

In another posting (here) I deal with some of the views of
MacSweeney (the canonisation of him, to be precise) but I don’t offer my own.
MacSweeney (who I met only a couple of times) pops in and out of my
autrebiographical texts (to be published whole as Words out of Time: autrebiographies and unwritings (see some excerpts here and here). I fish these four direct
references out of the texts that make this up.

I don’t remember buying Barry MacSweeney’s poem about Jim
Morrison.

Why is there no news from Barry MacSweeney?

I came over but he was deep in MacSweeney and Rimbaud.

Barry MacSweeney recites his Mary Bell sonnets.

To contextualise: Just
22 and don’t mind dying came in a 7 inch square sleeve; I know I had a copy,
probably bought in Norwich
at the underground bookshop that was closing down. There was ‘no news’ because
I had invited him to do a reading in the early 1980s in Norwich, no reply. I too (‘he’) indulged in
the equation of MacSweeney and other doomed heroes, you can see. The last
quotation refers to the last gig I saw him do, in Southport
with Lee Harwood in about 1998 or 99 at which he read the notorious and
unpublishable ‘Mary Bell’ poems about the Tyneside child-killer who was herself
a child at the time of the murder.

MacSweeney haunts past and present. I have two copies of his
Hutchinson volume The Boy from the Green
Cabaret Tells of his Mother (see note 137 below): one signed and dated by
me: ‘robert g sheppard august 1974’, by which time I’d met him, having recorded
a London poetry reading with Tom Pickard (who read his brilliant ‘Dancing Under
Fire’) in 1974 for my tape magazine 1983.
I still have the blurred cassette on which I am surprised he read early poems.
The second is signed ‘All best wishes Barry MacSweeney Nov 1968 Liverpool,’ which I bought in the Oxfam shop a few years
ago. There’s something totemic about having two copies.

As a ‘linguistically innovative poet’, for me, the central MacSweeney
book has always been The Odes. I
reviewed this in Reality Studios in
1981, and this review is republished in Far
Language, whose title comes from MacSweeney, but I also beefed it up for the end of my ‘British Poetry
Revival’ chapter in The Poetry of Saying (Liverpool
University Press, 2005). It ran like
this (pp. 68-70):

With their celerity,
and condensation, Barry MacSweeney’s Odes
offer a tough view of politics in the late 1970s. Having made a
precocious beginning in the late 1960s, even being picked up by a major
publisher as a possible Geordie complement to the Liverpool Poets, and having
mixed with a broad range of poets, from Bunting and Pickard, to Prynne and
Mottram, who steered him away from such celebrity, MacSweeney developed a range
and authority that remained in his writing until his death in 2000.137

Pound had approvingly quoted
Bunting’s bilingual equation ‘Dichten = condensare’ in his ABC of Reading
(1951), to demonstrate that condensation is the essence of writing,138
but in Odes, whose title might suggest a debt to Bunting’s own two books
of ­Odes, ‘the style is compressed, paratactic.’139 This is not the economy that comes of careful
revision but is an economy built into the compositional process. Condensation
is so acute, its resultant autonomy frustrates the processes of naturalization.
Perhaps learning from the increased impaction found in the work of Prynne at
this time, as he too moved from the Olsonian inheritance, MacSweeney has said,

I’ve worked towards this
condensing of language, this cutting across meaning, not having words next to
each other which are supposed to be there … I think they are shocking. 140

By squeezing metaphoric language
into this indeterminacy MacSweeney, like Bill Griffiths, has ensured that the
poems stay poetic. Celerity is a guerilla tactic against
a language that belongs increasingly to the controllers of our society.In ‘Far Cliff Babylon’ MacSweeney can adopt a
persona that declares with frightening simplicity in lines that are parodied
throughout the piece:

I
am 16.

I
am a Tory.My

vision
of the future represents

no
people.141

The Babylonian exile of the
reggae of the era (‘I have no people/They represent me’) merges with the
sinister tones of Igy Pop’s lyric, ‘No Fun’, that operates as a resistant echo
of the other NF, the National Front, which, as we have seen from Lud Heat,
was a small but potent force throughout the 1970s.142More positively, ‘No Fun’ counterpoints
another slogan: ‘No more apartheid’. 143

The poem is what
MacSweeney would ironically call a number of his angry poems of the 1980s: a
state of the nation address. The sceptre of unemployment hovers in the surreal
image of

your
natty dread future is a dole card

stamped
with asteroids exploding

across
the city of my

birth.144

The reader is forced to
join in the mechanics of language, cannot rest in too many of the familiar
notions of space/time, social detail, idea, or traditional image, most of the
comforting impedimenta of ‘poetry’. In ‘Far Cliff Babylon’ there comes the
stark realization that ‘I have died every day since I gave up poetry./Dangerous
condescending humans lapped it up.’ 145 Despite this, the real
triumph of these poems is that they ‘move’ the reader - in both senses of the
word.Yet the ‘movement’ of the poems,
the celerity of the text, resists that static aestheticization of the feeling,
that comforting, introspective notion, of having been ‘moved’. It recalls what
Forrest-Thomson said of the alternative linguistic orderings evoked by poetic
artifice. That the lines ‘I am 16/I am a Tory’ quote the young William Hague,
leader of the Conservative Party from 1997 until 2001, makes the poem seem
prophetic, a bridge to the poetry of the 1980s and 1990s.

*

And beyond, I think, into
the 2000s and 2010s: Mr Hague’s now shiny skull is thought a useful target for
a nail in Sean Bonney’s Happiness published
two years ago. (Look it up.) It’s a cogent enough account, it still seems to me
(and I note how the hero-worshipping and the mythical aspects are strategically
ignored).

When The Tempers of Hazard appeared in 1993 (I got my copy pretty quick
and avoided the notorious pulping) I was surprised to see the anarchic and
typographically wild ‘Liz Hard’ and ‘Jury Vet Poems’, but I’d always found them
‘difficult’ in a different way, a less-guarded way, than Odes, and I don’t mention them here (though to be fair I was
writing a history of the British Poetry Revival, whose dating generally ends in
1978). Looking at them now, and wondering if I am up to writing about them, I
realise that they should be formally regarded as a continuation of the
impaction of the Odes, despite the
scatological and sexual violence of the content (Bush refers to them as the
‘Jury Vet Odes’, which encourages me in this identification). As readers of
these posts will have noticed, FORM is what I am interested in with my current
critical project. But before I turn to that, I recall another debt to
MacSweeney in my creative work. I am making this clear to myself (and others)
before moving on.

The apparently
non-parenthetical remark above ‘until his death in 2000’ was added at a late
stage in the preparation of the manuscript of The Poetry of Saying (as were the references to Hague, it seems;
MacSweeney himself confirmed the quote but I have seen the odious video of the
infant Hague uttering these words through his Giles cartoon chin). But this
wasn’t the only reference to the sad fact of MacSweeney’s death in my work. (I
found out about it by picking up a copy of The
Guardian in The Willow Bank in Liverpool
and read Andrew Crozier’s obituary. It was quite a shock.) The last poem of my
long intratextual project TwentiethCentury Blues was the millennial ‘Empty Diary 2000’. The character ‘Pearl’,
who appears in a kind of semi-Beckettian comic-tragic pairing with ‘George’
throughout the project, and is the narrator of this poem, is of course not the
same Pearl as the one eulogised by MacSweeney in his searing pastoral ‘Pearl’
poems. (They are both based on different real people.) Here is the poem
(revised from the unsatisfying prose version in Tin Pan Arcadia). The dedication to MacSweeney, which seemed
inevitable at the time) is only at the end because of the terrible rhyming
couplet it would make if placed just after the title. (Try it.) It’s not
‘about’ MacSweeney, but seems appropriate to him; there’s as much from Noel
Coward (‘Poor Little Rich Girl’ rather than ‘Twentieth Century Blues’), Kiki of
Monparnasse, Roland Barthes, Harryette Mullen, even Angela Carter, and it’s a
farewell to the entire project and the
‘Empty Diary’ strand that runs through it like the legendary ‘Fuck You’ supposedly
printed through miles of Brighton Rock that had to be destroyed. There exists,
however, an Empty Diary 1327 (coincidentally written in the last few days, a
Petrarch 3 variation) and an Empty Diary 2055 (a homage to cyberpunk in the Blues itself) as well as the complete 1901-2000
series (though I have it in mind to extend it into this century at some point:
2001-2014 perhaps, 14 fourteen-liners).

For the sake of completion, I took a look at my When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry (Shearsman,
2011), a book I thought did not include much on Barry MacSweeney. In fact there
are a string of references, on one occasion countering the mythologising of him
by Iain Sinclair. But more germane to my current theme, his role at the Poetry
Society during the years covered by Peter Barry’s The Poetry Wars is outlined and I compare his more assertive
political poetry to that of Lee Harwood, but introduce it with sound-bites from
Marcuse’s 1977 book The Aesthetic Dimension … :

‘In its autonomy art both protests [the prevailing social
relations], and at the same time transcends them. Thereby art subverts the
dominant consciousness, the ordinary experience’ and its ordinary language
which, one might add, the manifesto [ of the Poetry Society] also questions.
(Marcuse 1979: ix) Marcuse sees the ‘logic’ of art – via its distanciation, and
other techniques hinted at in the manifesto – as culminating in ‘another
reason, another sensibility’, which defy prevailing conditions, with its own
‘categorical imperative: “things must change”’. (Marcuse 1979: 13)The critical function of the work of art
re-establishes the emancipatory dreams of the 1960s in a new 1970s formalism….
Barry MacSweeney, at one time chair of the Poetry Society, in a public mode of
poem he would call later ‘a State of the Nation bulletin’ (MacSweeney 2003:
138) …delivers a public address in a
clipped shorthand that may owe as much to his journalistic training as it does
to the example of Allen Ginsberg’s public ‘Poems of these States’, an excerpt
of which provides the epigraph to his 1977-78 poem, ‘Black Torch Sunrise’.
MacSweeney offers images of potential insurrection, or of ‘1968 failure’:

Whipped legs

of
left-bank women students

blur
on the shimmered screen

625
line consciousness(MacSweeney 2003: 75)

The public scene is mediated through the latest televisual
technology but the language is ‘direct’. It is a public discourse that
disarmingly answers its own questions: ‘Will the Labour Party uphold the
jailing of pickets?/ Of course.’ (MacSweeney 2003: 74).

*

Of course.

Footnotes

137. The early book was The Boy from the Green Cabaret
Tells of his Mother (London: New Authors, Hutchinson, 1968). MacSweeney had
published in Vogue as well as The English Intelligencer so one
can imagine that he was confused enough when, at the age of 20, he was
nominated for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry. MacSweeney turned to the
small presses for the next 25 years until he was anthologized by Iain Sinclair
in The Tempers of Hazard (with Thomas A. Clark and Chris Torrance)
(London: Paladin, 1993),pp. 133-285 and
in The Book of Demons, Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1997. He is well
served by Clive Bush, ‘Parts in the weal of kynde, Barry MacSweeney’,Out of Dissent,
pp.304-416.

138. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (London: Faber, 1951), p. 152.

139. ‘MacSweeney’, p. 36.

140. Ibid., p. 37.

141. Barry MacSweeney, Odes (London: Trigram Press,
1978), p. 57.

142. Ibid., p. 58.

143. Ibid., p. 58.

144. Ibid., p. 57.

145. Ibid., p. 60.

(All my posts on form, MacSweeney and other writers building up to create the project The Meaning of Form may be accessed here.)

Update September 2016: For those who can buy The Meaning of Form in Contemporary
Innovative Poetry, or order it for libraries, here are the places

Sunday, April 20, 2014

A
poetics piece dedicated to poet Sean Bonney, ‘Bad Poetry for Bad People!’
re-articulates many of the terms in this piece in a ‘forming action’ that drags
ideas in the wake of its forward trajectory. I come up with the term
‘manyfesto’ to distinguish its multiple unfinish from the ‘manifestos’ of art
(and politics). Written in response to Bonney’s talk about politics and poetry
at the same Edinburgh conference to which I presented a draft of ‘Form, Forms and Forming and the Antagonisms of Reality in Criticism, Poetics and Poetry’ (and
with the sounds of Bonney’s talk, my paper and the 2011 English riots ringing
in my ears), it brings together (and disperses) many of the themes of this
book, and demonstrates some of its concerns: it harbours (yet another) sonnet
in its midst, it contains a ‘poetry’ that cannot be paraphrased, it offers a
poetics that remains speculative, conjectural and provocative. It is a form
that thinks poetry. Read it here. It is also republished, revised, in my book Unfinish: see here.

It
begins (to give a taster):

i put myself in the scene i swerve new walls a mile high. An Investors in People plaque gleams
on the funeral director’s wall. Shadows cast us aside for evening’s soft
erasures, leave pencil shavings on paper. Political poetry will both say and
not say, modified by formal resistance. Commodifieda looted shop or Love on an impulse never
correct mistrust of getting some watches a clear Muse stream hash-tagged on
Twitter. This might be a way of approaching Adorno’s contention that the
unresolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as problems of form.
There’s….

Even a cursory
inspection of Charles Bernstein’s edited volume The Politics of Poetic Form (1990), a book that one might think pertinent to the theme of this
blogging, will reveal how little form
is actually referred to in any detail (by Rosmarie Waldrop alone as it happens
in the poetics piece ‘Alarms and Excursions’, examined in an earlier posting). It
is easier to talk politics, we might infer, than to interrogate form. I wish to
trace a politics of poetic form without losing sight of form as a vital force
of poesis. If poetry is the investigation of complex contemporary realities
through the means (meanings) of form – as I contend – then the investigation of
form itself is of paramount importance. It comes with a certain methodological
liberty and verve: ‘The vitality of reading for form is freedom from program
and manifesto, from any uniform discipline,’ (5) says leading new formalist
Susan J. Wolfson. Indeed, this formalism has been fighting against
instrumentalist readings of literature, ranging from the impositions of the New
Historicists to the quasi-sociology that passes for a lot of English teaching
still, particularly of poetry in schools, which often amounts to political
message unmediated by the effects of form. Wolfson counters this: ‘My deepest
claim is that language shaped by poetic form is not simply conscriptable as
information for other frameworks of analysis; the forms themselves demand a
specific kind of critical attention.’ (30)

I argue that the attention of any formal
study of contemporary poetry – for that is what I am currently writing – must
be dual. It must focus on form in the technical sense, on identifiable forms in play, the ones identified by
Veronica Forrest-Thomson in Poetic
Artifice as enjambment, line, rhythm, rhyme, etc., and on form in a general, more performative sense, that prioritises
acts of forming and our apprehension of their coming to form in our reading. Forms and forming I call this pair for ease. Associating one with the other,
Derek Attridge in The Singularity of
Literature argues that form is the force that stages a performance of any
text: we need to apprehend ‘the eventness of the literary work, which means
that form needs to be understood verbally – as ‘taking form”, of “forming”, or
even “loosing form”’(113),but he
insists that the devices of artifice ‘are precisely what call forth the
performative response’ of any engaged reader, directly connected to the event
of singularity which is the irruption of an inventive otherness in our
productive reading. (118)

Both types of form are capable of carrying a semantic or cognitive
charge, demonstrating that forms think. They contain or envelop meaning(s) of
knowledge(s) and might show how new meaning and (non-propositional) knowledge
might be formed and formulated. As such, aesthetic form carries a force operating
on the individual (or collective) reader or viewer, which – in the case of
poetry – means that the reader is the site where such meanings are staged by
form, so that reading is formulating form, and formulating it into fluxing
semantic and cognitive forms as a ‘performed mobility’. (111). Wolfson even
writes that literature lovers ‘respond to forms as a kind of content’. (Rawes
214) Formal considerations of both kinds (forms and forming) are engaged by active reading and enact meanings
that moderate, exacerbate, subvert (and on rare occasions reinforce) the kind
of extractable meaning that Forrest-Thomson and Attridge both decry as
‘paraphrase’. If apprehension of form is not, or not only, a matter of
collecting the devices of poetic artifice, of forms, but a question of entering into the process by which the
text finds form in our reading, as forming,
there can be, strictly, no paraphrase; indeed, paraphrase, a mode by which
meaning is supposedly skimmed off the surface of reading as a residue or even
an essence, or worse, a ‘political’ slogan, is a violation of the processes of
forms forming. Paraphrase is amnesia of form.

‘An “artist” is someone who presents problems of forms,’ insists Lyotard
in ‘The Critical Function of the Work of Art’, using the plural of the word as
my study does, in alliance with, but distinct from its singular form. He
continues: ‘The essential element, the only decisive one, is form. Modifying
social reality is not important at all if it aims at putting back into place
something that will have the same form.’
(83 Driftworks Lyotard) As true as these two sentences might be, the analogy
that is suggested between the plastic forms of art practice, form as a decisive
category of aesthetics or poetics, and ‘form’ as social and political formation
in the service of an understated social ‘modification’, is an utopian one not
sustained beyond his textual practice of periodic juxtaposition and the
cognitive wilfulness of wishful thinking. It moves, as the arguments often do,
too quickly, from ‘form’ as I am tracing its adventure in my current study, to
social transformation as that is envisioned by radical politics. In the
transfer events of forms and acts of forming are ignored: form is lost.

Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory was
published in 1970, the same year as Lyotard’s post-1968 speculations, but takes
a more nuanced view of what is a long standing interaction in aesthetics,
beginning in Schiller, between the forms of life and the forms of art. ‘The
unresolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of
form,’ Adorno says, thus immediately aligning, but separating, politics and
form. (Adorno Theory: p. 6). The relationship between reality and form is
announced in a way which seems to settle the issue. Antagonisms that have been
resolved do not make their appearance, have historically played themselves out,
it seems. Those unhappily unresolved
antagonisms – of class one supposes – ‘return’ in artworks. They exist prior to
their appearance as form therefore. By this formulation, they could not arise in the artwork, certainly not as content
and only as form, or to be precise as ‘a problem of form’, whatever that might
mean, and as an immanent, intrinsic one at that. Both Lyotard and Adorno see
the artist presenting problems of
form or forms, rather than form or its forms (or indeed forming) themselves. To
continue with Adorno: the dynamic social forces of antagonism re-appear after
the event as problems (which presumably have possible solutions) in the very
substance of ‘the objective organisation within each artwork of what appears to
be bindingly eloquent’ (p. 143), to use one of Adorno’s multiple definitions of
form. For philosophy, an eloquent problem might be a forceful expression of its
ceaseless activity; for an artist, problems of form or forms may be questions
of poetics as I define it, as a speculative writerly discourse about the future
of his or her activity, of acts of forming. But that is to return to the primal
scene of poesis too hastily. Let us pursue Adorno’s definitions of form from a
social perspective: ‘Form is what is anti-barbaric in art; through form art
participates in the civilization that it criticizes by its very existence.’
(143) This asserts, a sting sharp in its tail, a now familiar conception of the
critical function of the work of art, but which involves form as acts of
forming, as dynamic participants in critique. Another definition suggests how
the immanent problems reconfigure, how form mediates its critical function by
operating on the world through itself, by turning onto, or back to, itself: ‘Form
converges with critique. It is that through which artworks prove self-critical.’ (144: my emphasis) The
problems of form and forms offer the modalities of critique in acts of forming, at those moments
when form becomes visible. ‘If form is that in artworks by which they become
artworks,’ argues Adorno, a formalism with which we might concur, ‘it is
equivalent with their mediatedness, their objective reflectiveness into
themselves.’ (144) Reading
for form is allowing critical form to become critical function. Mediation to be
complete must involve the finding, making, or even losing of form by the user
of the artwork.

This has an art-historical aspect: ‘By its critical implication, form
annihilates practices and works of the past.’ (144) A chapter in progress (there’s
a version on Pages in 14 parts (of
course!) ‘The Innovative Sonnet Sequence’, it begins here, and ends here, and was posted daily for a fortnight) outlines the vicissitudes in the
history of the sonnet, the emergence of the innovative sonnet in one literary
milieu in response to the perceived redundancy of the traditional sonnet. Jeff
Hilson’s anthology The Reality Street
Book of Sonnets is a monument to formal annihilation, to form analysing
itself by fruitful exploration of the possible contemporary formal meanings of
the sonnet frame.

To repeat my self-consciously formalist thesis: Poetry is the investigation of complex
contemporary realities through the means (meanings) of form. But for Adorno
there is a further chain in the argument that forges the link between formal
introspection and political critique: ‘Form is the law of the transfiguration
of the existing, counter to which it represents freedom.’ (143) A
representation of freedom is not freedom itself, of course, and Adorno
characteristically sees the melancholy and guilt of the transfigurative situation
in that ‘form inevitably limits what is formed’, since ‘selecting, trimming,
renouncing’ must be a major part of poesis. ‘Without rejection there is no
form, and this prolongs guilty domination in artworks, of which they would like
to be free; form is their amorality.’ (144) I’m not sure this is experienced at
the level of poesis (chopping out an unnecessary simile or adjective, sweeping
away a passage of exposition in a piece of fiction, can be exhilarating), but
at an historical level (say, of rejecting traditional sonnet forms for
innovative ones) it might be felt as guilt. Indeed, this is not a million miles
away from WH Auden’s guilty realisation that ‘a poem which was really like a
political democracy would be formless’; a society organised like a good poem
(by Auden’s poetics) would be a totalitarian regime, a remark that has haunted
and stimulated my thinking for some decades. (quoted in Raban, p. 27)It certainly flowed into the formal
selections for writing my poem The Lores
in the mid-90s, where ‘the text’s poetic focus is the relationship of fascism
to micro-fascism and the matching resistances to that at both the Grand Level
and at ground level,’ is negotiated in part by the formal frame of ‘various
word counts for the poem [which] derive from Plato’s The Laws, in which
5040 is considered the ideal number of citizens for his second ,[more
repressive,] Republic because it is a number divisible by most numbers, and is
therefore useful for the raising of taxes and militia, and – doubtless – for
surveillance’ (Sheppard 2008: 383-4):

HISTORY MATERIALISES A

HALO OF EXTINCTION

XWHICH FLOATS

ABOVE YOU CLOCKS

RUST ON SHOP

FRONTS YOUR MUGSHOT

FLASH BETWEEN NEGATING

BARS THE DEFENCE

IMPLODES IN PROVISIONAL

MARGINS OF CODE

REVOLUTIONARY PLEASURE
STRUGGLES

WITHOUT HEROES WHILE

BLOCS OF SENSATION

PINCH THE EYE

MANACLES HOLD YOUR

HANDS IN AN

ATTITUDE OF PRAYER

AS THE POSTMAN

APPEARS FROM NOWHERE

DIASPORA-LINKAGE IN

THE CRUSH OF

YAWNING TURF-GRAVES

A SINGLE IMPACT

PEPPERS OUR GIFTS

STREET-COLLISION
FETISHES

MARKET THE ORDINARY

PRAYERS ETHICS FROZEN

IN CELESTIAL GUILT

DISPOSITIONS BEHIND LIMP

FLAG FRAMES A

NEWSREEL THE LIGHT

WHERE PERCEPTION BECOMES

ETHICAL TO REGIMENT

THE PARTY OF

A-TOPIA HE QUESTIONS

FROM CROUCHING GUN

POSITIONS ANSWERS WITH

BOHÈME IN YOUR

BOARDROOM DUST
GRAFFITIST

SERENADES THE VECTORS

BOOT SERMONS KICK

COMPETITIVE BARRICADES

The forms of life and the forms of art have been entangled since Romantic
aesthetics gave us the terms. ‘Form is the seal of social labour, fundamentally
different from the empirical process of making,’ (144) remarks Adorno, and this
is true, but the empirical process of making, poesis and its poetics, must lie
behind any presentation of the problems of form, and it is one I want to return
to as someone who presents problems of form(s) as poems. ‘Milton produced Paradise Lost for the same reason that a silkworm produces silk. It
was an activity of his nature,’ Marx commented, (Marx in Milton ed. Davies, p. 19) a little too easily,
but it does remind us that Schiller asserted, in On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) that ‘Man … is only wholly Man when he is playing’
and ‘he shall play only with Beauty.’
(Schiller p. 80; italics his)The
shaping of beauty can only be facilitated by the ‘play impulse’ but the ‘object
of the form impulse’ is ‘shape… a
concept which includes all formal qualities of things and all their relations
to the intellectual faculties’ (p. 76, italics his). This is in distinction to
its reciprocatory antagonist, the ‘sense impulse’, whose object is ‘life’ to the wholeness of Man. (76: but see also
p. 118) Art and life are separate until brought together. Schiller leaves us in
no doubt that the Man who is wholly himself in play and sense becomes adequate
to realities beyond himself by becoming a man of form, as it were: ‘When … the
formal impulse holds sway, and the pure object acts within us, there is the
highest expansion of being, all barriers disappear, and from being the unit of
magnitude to which the needy sense confined him, Man has risen to a unit of idea embracing the whole realm
of phenomena.’ (Schiller: 67; his italics.)

Jacques Rancière, in his 2002 essay ‘The Aesthetic Revolution and its
Outcomes’ points to Schiller’s equation of these drives and summarises: ‘There
exists a specific sensory experience that holds the promise of both a new world
of Art and a new life for individuals and the community, namely the aesthetic.’ The Romantic
breakthrough of which Schiller was part is ‘one that reframes the division of
the forms of our experience to this day’, he claims. (Dis: 115 ranc) This
results in ‘three major scenarios’ concerning this relationship, similar to the
triad established by Schiller: ‘Art can become life. Life can become art. And
art and life can change their properties.’ (119) One of Rancière’s ‘scenarios’
(the last, in effect that art and life can change and perhaps exchange their
properties) is particularly seductive but dangerous for the contemporary artist
in Rancière’s attractive description. ‘The prose of everyday life becomes a
huge fantastic poem’ sounds inviting (particularly to poets!), the poet
becoming ‘not only a naturalist or an archaeologist, … he also becomes … a
symptomologist, delving into the dark underside …to decipher the messages engraved in the very
flesh of ordinary things’, but this is to run the risk of making the
extraordinary ordinary, and results (‘taken to its extreme’) in the vapid ‘political’
art of ‘exhibitions of re-cycled commodities’: ‘denunciation … becomes part of
the game’. (126-7) How I think of certain exhibitions at the Liverpool
Biennial, but the textual equivalent might be a work such as Alexandra Nemerov’s
‘First My Motorola’ which ‘is a list of every brand she touched over the course
of a day’, and is an exemplar of uncreative writing in Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing published in
2011. (457-62):

First, My Motorola

Then my Frette

Then my Sonia Rykiel

Then my Bulgari

Then my Asprey …. (457)until

And finally, my Motorola (462)

Nemerov’s text attempts
to trace the multiple signatures of late capitalism, but does nothing with those
traces; from a formal point of view this text fails to transform the phenomena it frames (unlike,
say, Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day or
Vanessa Place’s Statement of Facts). It
is unadorned product placement that ‘my’ of the circularity of the diurnal
return to ‘And finally’ hardly ironises enough (for this reader). Art and life change
their properties, perhaps, and in the act de-value both; exchange is not, after
all, transformation.1

However, between these three scenarios that Rancière describes (the other
two entropic ‘vanishing points’ are art becoming life and life becoming art,
remember) creative artists inevitably ‘shuttle … playing one linkage with art
and non-art against another such linkage’. (132) The artist buzzes like a fly
between the three planes of his or her conceptual prison. This places the poet
in an interestingly nuanced and unstable position: ‘Aesthetic art promises a
political accomplishment that it cannot satisfy, and thrives on that ambiguity,’
says Rancière, quite positively. (133) The forms of life and the forms of art
touch and partly re-negotiate their relationship, perhaps continually. Rancière
calls this process ‘dissensus’: ‘If there exists a connection between art and
politics, it should be cast in terms of dissensus, the very kernel of the
aesthetic regime: artworks can produce effects of dissensus precisely because
they neither give lessons nor have any destination’. (140) Dissensus is defined
in contradistinction to the manufacture of ‘democratic’ consensus as ‘a
political process that resists juridical litigation and creates a fissure in
the sensible order by confronting the established framework of perception,
thought and action with the “inadmissible”’. (in Glossary in The Politics of Aesthetics: p. 85)
Forces of subjectivation are energised by its rupture of reality. Its politics operate much like the approved
model of the aesthetic in Rancière’s thought.2

‘The dream of a suitable political work of art,’ Rancière says elsewhere
in an interview, ‘is in fact the dream of disrupting the relationship between
the visible, the sayable and thinkable’ – the three essential regimes of his
thinking – ‘without having to use the terms of a message as a vehicle’, like
Nemerov; instead producing ‘meanings in the form of a rupture with the very
logic of meaningful situations.’ (Polit 63) In effect, a dissensual rupture. Rupture
– which I interpret, or at least envisage, as a formal activity –is inherently meaningful.
As Benjamin comments: ‘Interruption is one of the fundamental devices of all
structuring.’ (Benjamin: 58?)

Rancière, writing in 2003, issued a minatory corrective to the purely
technical comprehension of poesis, and reminds us of a certain entropy of
technique, in formal actitivity that is not, or is no longer, effective,
because complicit with social and political processes, in the case of collage
or ‘meanings in the form of a rupture’ to use his expression:

Linking anything with everything whatsoever, which yesterday passed for
subversive, is today increasingly homogeneous with the reign of journalistic anything contains everything and the
subject-hopping of advertising. We therefore need … to put some disorder back into montage.
(Rancière 2007: 51)

To me, this last corrective is a brilliant description of the ethics, if
not politics, of form in late Tom Raworth (as I’ve written elsewhere and won’t
repeat here, in both The Poetry of Saying
and in When Bad Times Made for Good
Poetry). ‘Suitable political art would ensure … the production of a double
effect: the readability of a political signification and a sensible or
perceptual shock caused … by the uncanny, by that which resists signification’.
(63 of The Politics of Aesthetics) Although this is not, like Adorno’s, a
strictly formalist reading, it is difficult for me to see how a ‘sensible or
perceptual shock’ might be achieved without formally investigative operations,
such as in a re-vitalised montage that suggests dissensual rupture rather than
connection; but I fail to see why the fashionable ‘uncanny’ should be the only
means available to achieve this. The double effect can only occur in moments of
forming, when the text takes form before our eyes in our actual interaction
with the text. The critical function of art is born in the instant its form
de-forms and re-forms in front of us as precisely the representation of freedom
that Adorno describes. If forms know anything they know at least to do this.

In my first
presentation of this chapter as a paper at the Conversify Conference in Edinburgh in October 2011,
I ended here on this formalist flourish but I’d like to share the original
ending because it points to certain difficulties I’ve had with my poetics of
form and my formalist poetics.

There [I might
have said]: I’ve rattled on so long, reached the outer limits of my current
critical thinking, and not left enough time for examples. I’m meant to be
talking about Barry MacSweeney, and want to write about his particular forms in
my book on form. My original abstract promised: ‘I test the political
implications of this [my notions of form] by an examination of Barry
MacSweeney’s varied use of form, from the impaction of ‘Odes’ to the political
transparency of a number of his ‘State of the Nation Addresses’, from the
lyricism of the ‘Pearl’ poems to the anger of the late mythologizing poems of
alcoholic disintegration.’ Even then I realised: ‘While I will be unable to
cover all of this in a paper I focus upon events of forming as central to
reading and question how the political operates within readerly forming and within
the forms of poems. This might be a more productive way of approaching Adorno’s
contention that “The unresolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as
immanent problems of form.”’ I believe this to have been the case. However, in
another way I’ve written myself into a corner. But it’s an interesting one. And
one I’ve been in before, where, like now, I was caught between literary
critical concepts, the speculative discourse of my poetics, and literary
creation. The moment was the mid 1990s and the concept was not form but
‘creative linkage’ as a specific description of the ‘accelerated collage’ at
work in Tom Raworth, Allen Fisher, Ulli Freer and Adrian Clarke. This resulted
in a personal poetics of creative linkage and a literary work, The Lores, which put that theory of textual
impaction into poetic practice. Using quite other materials, the thinking of
Adorno and Rancière, and the whole league of ‘new’ formalist critics, nevertheless
leads me back to the knot where criticism, poetics and poetry meet. Writing
this one week after rioting occured about half a mile from where I’m sitting, I
feel impelled to re-visit the angry core of The
Lores and figure out what might be my contemporary version of Ranciere’s
‘double effect: the readability of a political signification’ – nobody is
saying the poem isn’t saying – against ‘a sensible or perceptual shock caused …
by that which resists signification’.

The time capsule’s

contract with the

future, the Eugenics’

Court with its

injections, co-ops us

to a selective

history: as soon

as the population

is trafficking clatters

the shutters down

the laws of

motion beyond its

jurisdiction, unceased husks

in lightning streaks

Flicks to see

who flinches empty

me from your

circumference, accommodations of

space an abacus

for millions who

stand beside us

pure result with

no contest empty

microphones and dead

amplifiers inside each

rule if she

moves any slower

she’s our commodity

Political poetry will both say and not say, modified by formal
resistance and interruption. (See a condensed version of this piece, with additions, here.) Check out all my posts concerning form here.

Update September 2016: For those who can buy The Meaning of Form in Contemporary
Innovative Poetry, or order it for libraries, here are the places

1. Is Alexandra Nemerov a relative of
Alex Nemerov (male), a wonderful academic I met in Amsterdam? We realised both of our fathers
had been in the RAF. Poetry readers should be able to work out who his was.

2. Guattari also uses the term in his
suggestive late The Three Ecologies to
contrast ‘a stupefying and infantalizing consensus’ with ‘the singular
production of existence’ from micro-political groups operating in short term
autonomous activism.’ (50: Guattari.)